blog.Objector.us

Excerpts from:

The Demise of Conscience
http://www.lewrockw ell.com/hornberg er/hornberger150 .html
by Jacob G. Hornberger / August 22, 2008
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Conscience and aggressive war

Everyone agrees that neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi
people ever attacked the United States. Everyone agrees that no Iraqi
participated in the 9/11 attacks. There is no question but that in
the Iraq War, the United States is the aggressor nation and Iraq is
the defending nation.

In the run-up to the invasion, I recall reading an article in which
U.S. soldiers were asking military chaplains whether God would
forgive them for killing Iraqis. It was obvious that their
consciences were bothering them. I suspect that they were wondering
whether it was consistent with God’s law to kill people whose
government had not attacked their country.

I’ll never forget reading what some of the chaplains told those
soldiers. They told them that they need not concern themselves with
what lay ahead. They said that they could place their trust in the
judgment of their commander in chief. In other words, they could go
into Iraq and kill people without having any crisis of conscience.

One cannot help but wonder whether those chaplains, in reaching their
judgment, confronted the critical moral question: How could the
killing of any Iraqi be morally justified, given that the U.S.
government was going to be the aggressor in the conflict? How could
killing people while serving as part of an aggressor force be
reconciled with God’s laws? I can’t help but wonder how many U.S.
soldiers who were struggling with their conscience before the
invasion are bedeviled by it today.

A reflection of the demise of conscience that has accompanied the
warfare state is the fact that, as far as I know, only one U.S.
soldier refused to deploy to Iraq on the grounds that to do so would
involve the wrongful killing of people. He was an officer – Lt. Ehren
Watada. Watada pointed out that not only was the war on Iraq illegal
from the standpoint of U.S. law (because the president had failed to
secure the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war
against Iraq), it would also constitute the war crime of waging a war
of aggression. Watada’s conscience would not permit him to kill
people in such a conflict.

How was Watada treated by U.S. officials? As a criminal. The U.S.
military prosecuted him for refusing to obey orders to deploy to
Iraq. He was ridiculed for following the dictates of conscience. The
Pentagon’s mistreatment of Watada was a powerful message to any other
soldier who might be struggling with his conscience – that this is
what happens to people of conscience in the U.S. army.

While several civil libertarians came to Watada’s defense, it would
be safe to say that most Americans didn’t know about or didn’t care
about his case. Conscience, it is widely assumed, can play no role
once the nation is at war, at least not with respect to whether one’s
own government is in the right or the wrong. All that matters is
victory. It was the same mindset that guided most Germans in World War II.
—

No remorse for the Iraqi dead

On top of all these shifting and morphing rationales for killing
Iraqis was the official policy of the Pentagon, announced early on,
that U.S. forces would not keep count of the Iraqi dead. Isn’t that a
rather unusual policy for a government that is supposedly doing all
this for the benefit of the Iraqi people?

Through it all, most Americans have had absolutely no remorse for the
Iraqi dead and maimed. Having stultified consciences, those Americans
just don’t care that Iraqis have been killed. In fact, the only
reason that many Americans are having second thoughts about Iraq is
that American soldiers are being killed there, not because people’s
consciences are bothering them because of all the Iraqi people
killed. They simply take the attitude that since it’s war, people are
going to die, or they compare it to other wars and blithely conclude,
“Oh well, at least the number of people killed isn’t as high as it
has been in other wars.”

Conscience and Iraqi deaths

In fact, some Americans have reduced the Iraq War to a mathematical
equation, one which holds that any number of Iraqi deaths is worth it
if it helps to achieve “democracy.” Conscience has disappeared in
that equation.

All too many Americans have convinced themselves that any war in
which the U.S. government is involved, including a war of aggression
against a country that never attacked the United States, is
automatically a just war. Such a conclusion, they feel, relieves them
of any exercise of conscience with respect to the consequences of such a war.

But only defensive wars are morally justifiable and consistent with
God’s commandment against killing. Does God permit killing people
under a fake and false WMD rationale? Does God permit killing a
person for the sake of democracy-spreading ? Does God permit killing
people as part of a “magnet” defense? Does God permit killing people
as part of some conjured-up Islamic plan to conquer the Christian West?

Many Americans, including some priests and ministers, don’t dare to
ask those questions because to do so might require the exercise of
conscience, which is not an easy process to undergo.

The demise of conscience has produced a society of people who go to
church on Sunday, where they regularly pray for the troops in Iraq,
without permitting their consciences to consider the fact that the
U.S. government has no right to be in Iraq and that the troops have
no right to be killing Iraqi people.

How many Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and occupation of
Iraq? We don’t know the exact number because, again, the Pentagon has
steadfastly said that it has absolutely no intention of keeping track
of how many Iraqis it kills. But the best estimates indicate that
approximately a million Iraqis have been killed as a consequence of
the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Now, reflect on that for a few minutes. One million people, dead. Not
a thousand. Not a hundred thousand. Not half a million. One million
dead people. That is not a small number of dead people.

Now, add that million to the estimated hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
people who died as a result of the brutal sanctions against Iraq
during the 1990s.

The standard attitude among all too many Americans is that it’s all
been “worth it” because Saddam Hussein was a “bad man” who needed to
be replaced by a U.S. stooge. It was the same attitude of UN
Ambassador Madeleine Albright, who told Sixty Minutes that the deaths
of half a million Iraqi children from the sanctions had been “worth
it” – i.e., worth the attempt to oust Saddam from power and replace
him with a ruler acceptable to U.S. officials.

But no American, including U.S. soldiers, had the moral right to kill
even one Iraqi, much less a million, simply because Saddam Hussein
was a “bad man” whom U.S. officials were trying to oust from power.
God does not permit the killing of any person for the sake of
democracy-spreading , making them “magnets,” or imaginary threats. The
commandment is clear: Thou shalt not kill.

Meanwhile, Americans blithely go about their business at home,
indifferent to or even enthusiastic about the number of Iraqi people
killed at the hands of the U.S. war machine in a war of aggression
against people who never attacked the United States and who did not
want war with the United States.

Conscience – the ferreting out of right and wrong and the pursuing of
right – has been subordinated to the almighty judgments and decisions
of the federal government. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “Indeed
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his
justice cannot sleep forever.”

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